Introduction to an unbelievably rich but previously unknown British private collection of Turkmen tribal carpets, rugs and trappings

Written by the leading expert of Turkmen textiles

See also Turkmen Carpets: The Hoffmeister Collection ISBN 9783897903425 by Elena Tsareva

The publication introduces for the first time the extraordinarily rich yet previously unknown British collection of Turkmen tribal carpets, rugs and trappings by Neville Kingston. The exceptional private collection forms the departure point for an exciting account of the development of the Turkmen weaving tradition, which lies at the heart of Eurasian textiles.

Thanks to Elena Tsareva's extensive study of the art of Turkmen carpets in the light of archeological and historical data, a complex picture of central Asian textiles has emerged. It shows how every epoch has contributed to the fundamentals of carpet-weaving and enriched it with new motifs, compositions and techniques.

Dr. Tsareva is an internationally respected specialist in the field of archaeologicaland ethnographic textiles, with particular expertise on the traditional carpet weaving of the people of Northern Eurasia. She worked for more than 30 years at the Russian Ethnographic Museum as curator Central Asian collections. In 2002 she moved to the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where she's curator of the Near Eastern collections and of the permanent exhibition 'Culture of the People of the Near East'.